Not only are there college course on it many good in depth books have been written about Microsoft's war on Linux and their behavior during what got called the browser wars, much of it was so counterproductive Microsoft is now one of it not the largest contributors to OSS now.
no idea whether they are, for a while they ‘embraced’ open source by attempting to squeeze out actual open source with their stuff that is at best open in name only.
I don’t trust MS one bit, they were absolutely shady then, I don’t think they actually have changed all that much
Wotc is engaging in similar counterproductive behavior.
seems pretty premature, the VTT is still in alpha
It doesn't matter too much if wotc's vtt is OSS or not, but it very much matters if their vtt is made for the needs of GMs or not.
see above, the thing is in alpha, so let’s see what it looks like in the end.
It supporting RAW is the minimum requirement, they did say you can ‘override’ the automation though, which should cover the DM needs part
With any ttrpg & vtt choice GMs have an extremely extremely outsized role in choosing what vtt the gm will be using at their table and preparing for their sessions. Players have almost none simply because they do almost none of the work in building the adventure the gm brings to the table each week. That's a situation analogous to a high level IT worker's damsay over software
you very much overrate the IT workers say in this, unless by high level IT you are talking about the CIO
I agree with the DM having more of a say in this though, certainly more than an IT worker has, at any level.
I’d assume that WotC knows this too.
Despite the GM's outsized role in both of those the blog post linked in the OP writes almost nothing on what the vtt offers a gm aside from mentioning some pretty severe problems they faced as a gm in the highly curated closed test.
yeah, too early to care. It’s an alpha and a highly curated test. Wake me when we have had a fully released version for 6 to 12 months. Until then it is much too early to care
Things like players being able to see secret areas they shouldn't because of fancy 3d camera positioning
should be relatively easy to fix
or the gm not being able to do the most basic of basic gm activity like simply being able to see a player's character sheet speak to a fairly significant disregard for the GM
to me they speak more to this being an alpha
and are not even moving beyond this one write-up or getting into things like
uvtt support.
they are mostly a 3d VTT, I would not mind uvtt support, but that sounds like a minor quibble (in that most users would not use it) and something they can implement in a few weeks if they want to
If wotc is serious about their vtt they need to put dramatically more than zero effort into spotlighting what it will offer the gm even if some of that effort is talking about whiteboard chats and power point friendly lists of internal design goals.
they have time to do that, I don’t see why them releasing a video with that in a few months would not be sufficient
